﻿Vote green ﻿andy brown

The central reality of our time is globalisation. Economically, socially and environmentally we have entered an era in which every single creature on the planet is living with the consequences of an out of control global economy.For most radicals this has resulted in an automatic assumption that globalisation is essentially a bad thing. I don’t think that is right. I believe great harm has arisen from many aspects of globalisation but intrinsically it ought to be a positive development that open-minded progressives ought to embrace.There is something immensely constructive about technology that enables a good idea to spread freely across the world via the internet in seconds. There is also something life affirming about living in an era when it is easy to link up with other cultures and visit other places. It adds to the pleasure of existence if you can enjoy food, music, art, and literature from across the planet and meet with people from a huge range of different backgrounds. Welcoming diversity and being open to ideas and people from other countries has always been a hallmark of progressive thinkers and an over confidence in the superiority of your own nation over others has done immense historical damage.So the question ought not to be: “how can we best oppose globalisation?” The real question ought to be: “how can we get the best out of globalisation and avoid the worst?”One of the most naïve and dangerous answers to that question is that we should just trust markets and they will sort it all out. I continue to believe that there are many areas of our lives where markets and free enterprise are actually very helpful and do need to operate with as few restrictions as possible. Yet the idea that we can trust them to always produce positive outcomes in a global economy is plainly failing.In a completely free global market production of goods moves to the place on the planet where labour is the cheapest and where conditions of work are the least secure. If we just passively accept that fact then we guarantee that nowhere on the planet can any manufacturing worker have a decent standard of living for decades to come. It is far better to establish trading zones within which everyone agrees to maintain certain standards of safety, quality benchmarks, workers’ rights, child labour regulations and environmental standards. I see nothing wrong with such zones establishing tariff walls and regulations that require anyone importing goods into that zone to meet the same standards or else be charged heavy customs. That is the great irony of people living in rust belt ex-manufacturing locations voting to leave the EU. In a global economy the only realistic ways of preserving any kind of future for manufacturing industry are heavy investment in future technology, major re-training and re-skilling programmes or protection of standards within a trading block. The impact of going for a series of wonderful new trade deals with places like India and China would be yet another wave of destruction of UK manufacturing under cheap foreign competition.One of the other major problems with free markets is that they drive companies to use cheapest and most productive techniques for their own immediate self interest and make no charge on those companies for the impact on everyone else of what they do. This means that if we do nothing then the best choice for bottom line immediate profits is to dredge up every drop of oil and gas and to burn it until such time as it becomes too expensive to get it out of the ground. The collective impact of doing this has already caused horrible damage via climate change, air pollution, and the wars that have broken out to secure control over the supply of fossil fuels. Logic therefore dictates that we need much stronger collective control over individual self interest before the damage that has already been done to the global climate gets utterly out of control.That is only one example of the problem of the contrast between global self-interest and individual self-interest. Across the planet forests are being stripped away in order to earn a quick buck for multinational corporations and we are presiding over a destruction of wildlife, much of which can never be reversed. We are also dumping a layer of plastic across the planet so comprehensive that there is not a single beach in the world that is free of the debris and no part of the oceans where life isn’t at risk from it. Moreover, we are dependent on food production methods that soak the land in fertilizers and pesticides and frequently require more calories to be burned in the production, storage and supply of food than are provided for the person who eats it. Put bluntly our food supply methods are simply unsustainable and we have 8 billion people to feed.All of which means that there needs to be better mechanisms for managing globalisation. We are in the bizarre situation of having a global economy, a global society and a global ecology but no serious global decision making. Faced with a major problem of rapidly accelerating climate change world leaders cobbled together a voluntary deal at Paris that is a significant and important step forward. It injects serious money into the markets and will make a big difference to the viability of alternative energy sources and help move us away from fossil fuels at speed. But it is a voluntary deal and the US – the biggest user of fossil fuels on the planet – has simply walked away from the deal without any sanctions whatsoever.Voluntary measures are simply not enough to cope with the scale of the problem. Globalisation requires global governance. The nation state is an inadequate solution to a global society. Either humanity finds a way to construct effective global decision making bodies or we are going to fail to handle the global challenges that increasingly dominate our lives. Ecologically this ought to be self evident. Economically the 2008 worldwide crash ought to have been enough to convince us that we need international government organisations that are strong enough to control and guide massive financial movements and to prevent damaging booms and busts. On both counts we have weak voluntary alliances trying to get to grips with powerful challenges and failing.That is what is so scary about the current retreat into the fearful politics of petty nationalism that comes from Trump, Putin and the Brexiteers. It is impossible to reverse globalisation. You can’t go back to an era when each nation produced most things for itself and had limited interaction with the rest of the world. Whether we like it or not the world is now completely interlinked and all of us are at the mercy of decisions made in other parts of the globe. But you can frighten people into believing that all their problems are caused by those outsiders who are out to ruin your country.We badly need the courage to move beyond those fears and beyond the era of the dominance of the nation state. This doesn’t mean that I believe that centralised organisations must always dominate over local ones. We need powerful local communities and local decision making. Equally obviously we need the nation state. We also need regional collaborative structures. But what the world most needs right now is effective global decision making bodies and strong internationalism.You can’t have globalisation without global government. Internationalism has moved from being a nice ideal to being an essential requirement for a successful future. We have a very long way to travel between the current weak and squabbling voluntary international deals to the kind of decisive internationalism that the planet now needs. We are not going to get there if we are scared of articulating the challenge and remain locked into thinking that belongs in a passing era when the nation state was the dominant organisational unit.

Donald Trump is at it again. On every level he oozes repulsiveness. He is selfish. He is smug. He is false. He lies without breaking sweat. He has no dignity. He treats women like trophies. And he thinks poor people from other countries are low life trash. Then he arrives at Davos & tries to tell every other world leader how great he is. Not even an audience of financiers seemed impressed.Yet he did get elected. And despite the lowest opinion poll ratings for any President at this stage of his time in office he still maintains rock solid support amongst the white middle-class voters of mid America. Indeed, I think that support level will rise in the next 12 months or more as his wild gamble on a tax cut boom plays out and the US economy roars forward. Expect to listen to a lot of nonsense as political commentators tell us with serious voices about how brilliantly his economic plan is working. Before the next bust comes and it all ends in utter chaos and misery.The far right and its ideologues aren’t going away any time soon. Indeed there are some signs that they are still getting stronger and they are likely to continue to do so until Trumps project crashes and burns economically. One of the many promises he has made to the American people is that they can have tax cuts but won’t experience any economic pain. The immediate impact of these cuts will be that the US will run an even larger budget deficit than it currently does. Something which may well inject activity into the economy and therefore achieve rapid increase in economic growth and some increase in tax revenues. But the idea that this growth will be sufficient to plug the budget gap or that the wild upswing in financial markets it will create can be sustained is implausible in the extreme. As is the idea that the huge balance of payments deficit the US is running can be sustained. Or the debts it is acquiring to pay for it. Sooner or later the realities are going to have to be faced and all but the richest voters are going to notice the impact on services they use.Just at the moment is relatively easy to see why Trump retains such a high proportion of support from the white middle class men and also a majority of the votes of white middle class women. Economic self-interest over-rode concerns about groping for a lot of female voters. But there was more to it than that. The psychology of far right politics is every bit as important as the economics. For many personality types the attraction of the strong man who is clear about what he wants to do is very powerful. That nice Mr Hitler was going to save a lot of German hausfraus from uncertainty and make the country great again and if a couple of Jews lost their homes in the process then so much the worse for them. That nice Mr Trump is going to make America great again and if a couple of Mexicans get their come uppance then who cares.The left isn’t immune to this disease either. Uncle Joe Stalin was building the socialist paradise and if a couple of eggs needing breaking then that was a small price to pay. Anyone who criticised got told they were a petty bourgeois splitter who really should get serious about their politics and accept party discipline because we needed strong leadership to fight capitalism. The 30 million people who died in the gulags, purges and state created famines that Stalin instituted are still largely forgotten by many people in Russia and instead they admire the memory of a big strong man who made the country great. The small details like all those deaths or the pact with Hitler that led to the destruction of half of the USSR has become forgotten in a fog of misplaced national pride. The same kind of misplaced faith in the leadership of a strong man that allows Putin to run a mafia state whilst continuing to enjoy the support of the majority of his countrymen.Rationality isn’t the point for those who like a strong national leader. The point is to share in the pride and to absorb the confidence that comes with knowing your place in the order. Which is why it is proving so hard to shift the opinions of those who feel they have found a safe home for their soul by identifying themselves so strongly with the new nationalists. It isn’t enough to provide rational arguments and win via putting forward better logic. The important thing for many is the emotional link. Donald Trump may be the biggest and most regular liar ever to occupy the White House – and that’s a hard ask - but that doesn’t matter if what you most want in life is to hear someone tell you what you’ve always longed to hear. That someone big and powerful is going to look after you and protect you. That someone is prepared to voice your deepest prejudices and tell you that they are good for the country. That you are on the side of the good guys who are going to clean up the country. That you can be a bigger person and feel more confident about your identity because you will share in the victory of your man.Rationality is, however, the point not just for those of us who oppose all of this but for the vast majority of floating voters. Never forget that there are a lot of people who voted for Obama and also for Trump. There are some Trump fanatics who we will never persuade because their faith matters more than reality. There are, however, an enormous number of minds that can be easily changed by exposing the hypocrisy. By continually attacking the gap between the words and the reality. A gigantic gap between promises and actions is already opening up and as it gets wider there are going to be more and more opportunities to expose the extent of the con trick that has been worked. Provided we keep putting forward honest workable alternatives to the politics of nostalgia and fear instead of just shouting them down and trying to ban their expression.There are a core of hard right fanatics who are incredibly hard to shift from their conviction that they are building the new order because it is deeply fused into their sense of identity. That group are likely to continue to shift further into certainty and towards violence and oppression whenever their ideas appear to be threatened. So we have to get used to conducting political life under the threat of far right violence and far right state oppression whenever they win political power.There are, however, an awful lot more people who don’t hold such horrible views as part of their psychological make up and simply thought that something needed to change and Trump might be the man to do it. People like this can be convinced by a well-funded charlatan like Trump for a short while but are a lot more convinced by their owned lived reality. As that reality starts to bite those people are going to start deserting the far right in droves. Tax cuts for the rich can’t make life better for the poor. When the poor start to encounter the brutal experience of stripped down and failing government services then it won’t take them long to turn on Trump and all those who have tried to defend him. The far right can only maintain any significant degree of widespread popular support during the period of the Trump boom and that support will go very quickly the moment we encounter the Trump bust.I am therefore curiously optimistic about the political future. The majority of the young have easily seen through the falsehoods of the far right. The majority of working people don’t share a self-interest with multi-billionaires. The newly emergent economies are full of energetic optimistic people and these societies and their views are going to become increasingly powerful relative to the old lethargic economies and their fearful protectionist politicians. The social forces backing change are stronger than those backing reaction.The main thing that worries me is the tendency of some on the radical left to believe that all they have to do is to articulate old ideas and old solutions and to look for a chance to put them into practice. That simply isn’t an adequate response to the serious fears that ushered Trump into power. A global economy and a global ecology can’t simply be wished away. Radicals need to put forward policies that can work in this new era and which offer hope. It is not enough to simply shout out our anger or to vote for old style left wing parties. There is a real need to explain how it is possible to live well within a global economy and to achieve liberty, equality and community within it.It is only when we have articulated that successfully and communicated the new ideas and policies that it requires that we will have real grounds for optimism.

Every year the rich and the powerful gather together at Davos to discuss what is happening and to plan for the future. On one level it is the perfect gathering for anyone who believes in conspiracy theories. If anyone is planning and directing our world then it is the conversations over dinner in that place that will be driving their decision making.The horrible truth is, of course, that no one is actually planning properly the management of our global economy and that is actually an even worse situation than the idea that an unelected elite is controlling us all. We remain remarkably vulnerable to chaotic market movements and even more vulnerable to commercial decision making based solely on immediate individual interest and short-term profit seeking. We also have no serious global planning despite having a global economy, a global ecology and an increasingly global society. That is a pretty major problem when the world is already starting to encounter some of the initial problems associated with climate change and all independent scientists are telling us there is a lot worse to come.Nevertheless, what is always interesting about Davos is how much it teaches us about the hopes and fears of those who have the strongest influences over our economic system and the best chance of exerting some sort of control over how it evolves.The first and most obvious thing to learn from the summit is how far the US has moved from its position of world leadership. Most of the delegates don’t seem to have been bothered about whether President Trump was going to be there or not and to have even less respect for his views. They were much more interested in what was being said in India and China than in Washington. So the delegates listened with respect and admiration as the Indian Premier, Narenda Modi pointed out the dangers of nations acting solely in their own interests and introducing protectionist measures. Just as Trump was putting import tariffs on solar panels. And the leading capitalists from across the world focused carefully on the words of a key member of the Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party. Because he was talking about opening up a new silk road and actively intervening in global markets if there was a repeat of the 2008 crisis whilst Trump was rambling on about America first.China was responsible for 35.2% of economic growth last year. The US for 17.9% and falling. India was responsible for 8.6%, whilst the UK contributed 1.6%. These kinds of statistics tell us where the world is going and which parts of it are going to increasingly dominate the scene.It was, however, not a speech from one of the new global powers that interested me most. It was the contribution from members of a panel that included the Chief Executive of Barclays Bank. Jes Staley told us in the polite language of bankers that we were heading for another crash and weren’t very well equipped to deal with it. Then Anne Richards, Chief Executive of M&G Investments echoed his concerns and said that if interest rates go up then there are companies that will not be able to pay their loans back. She also pointed to the risk associated with leveraged exchange traded fund products. I suspect you may never have heard of them. So be very afraid because no one had heard of credit default swops before we discovered that three times the entire global economy had been gambled on dodgy investment devices with obscure names and even more obscure contents. They then proceeded to go belly up and left ordinary people to cope with 10 years of austerity politics.What these talks at Davos mean is that some of the smartest and most knowledgeable insiders are now fearful that stock markets are over confident and that we aren’t equipped to cope with the fall out from a fresh crash. What has happened over the last decade is that large quantities of easy money have been pumped into the economic system by central bankers to ensure that the world financial system recovered from the near total collapse of 2007-8. In the UK the headline sum was £400 billion of injected stimulus via what was called quantitative easing. In the US they printed $3 trillion. Added to this stimulus has been the impact of ten years of near zero interest rates. To which we must also add a decade of national governments running large budget deficits and nationalising the bad debts of private banks. The scale of the stimulus for business has been unprecedented. Even more unprecedented than the scale of the suppression of wages, benefits and government spending on providing genuine services for the public. And on top of all that stimulus for markets we now have the Trump tax cuts. An unfunded budget stimulus on an astonishing scale that is based on a pure gamble that the economy will grow fast enough to pay for a give away to the well-off voters who voted rock solidly for him.Since all this easy new money has to go somewhere it is not surprising that stock markets are roaring ahead and banks are back to making profits. Nor is it surprising that financial traders are back to making huge bonuses from selling dodgy products with fancy new names like leverage exchange traded funds.What is surprising is, perhaps, the extent to which world leaders are being warned by thoughtful Chief Executives of major financial institutions that it can’t last and that it could all end in tears. Western central bankers no longer have any stimulus tools left in their cupboard if Trumps rush for growth creates another bust after its inevitable boom. No wonder some of the more intelligent capitalists are worried stiff.Incredibly, however, a possible source of salvation did emerge from the Davos summit. The Chinese delegate stated that his country was ready to inject a stimulus into the world economy to prevent a repeat of the damaging 2008 crash. That’s the ludicrous position we have now reached. The majority of capitalists around the world are simply enjoying the ride as markets shoot upwards and profits roll in. The thoughtful ones see all the signs that we’re stoking the fires of the next crash. And the only government that appears to be seriously planning for that contingency is the only one that isn’t scared of mixing state planning with market forces. The Chinese Communist Party may well prove to be the organisation that rescues capitalism from its next crisis.How ironic would that be? And how far have we moved away from the conscious open human control over the economic forces that currently dominate us that we need? Economics doesn’t need to control people. People can control economics. Provided we free ourselves from the legacy of an ideology that everything must be left to the control of markets.

In my last blog I asserted that we were entering a new era of technology, ecology, economics and society. That is a fairly big claim to make. But I don’t think it is an overestimate. I think we are about to experience a period of the most rapid and the most fundamental change that humanity has ever had to grapple with. So I thought that I would have a go at articulating some of the key questions that we are somehow going to have to answer over the next couple of decades. Everyone would come up with a different list but for what it is worth this is mine:

How do we make a global society sustainable?

How can 8 billion people enjoy a reasonable standard of living without destroying the planet with the waste from what they extract, consume and produce?

How can we move over to a predominantly electric powered society quickly enough and how can we generate that electricity without also generating dangerous levels of carbon dioxide?

How can we move quickly enough away from single use plastic products and deal with the remains of the plastic we have already produced?

How do we manage a global economy & steer it to the collective benefit?

When will the next global financial crisis strike and what measures have we taken to prepare ourselves to cope with its consequences?

How can we create more powerful local economies and societies within a world that is global?

How quickly can we adapt to technological changes such as robotics, bio-engineering and de-fossilised production technology whilst ensuring we get collective benefits from those changes?

What new skills, new lifestyles and what training are people going to need to adapt to major changes in job opportunities?

Will work simply change or will much of it be destroyed and how will we help those whose jobs are lost?

Do we want everyone to be in work and can we find work for everyone if we do? What are the alternative ways of organising society if work ceases to be something which everyone can or needs to do?

Will ownership of technology concentrate wealth in fewer hands and if so how will electors and their politicians reduce the inequalities?

How does the world adjust to the relative decline of countries like the US and the relative rise of places like Africa, India and the Far East without conflict?

How do we manage conflict in an era when technology of mass destruction can be acquired by most countries that have leaders who choose to do so?

How do aging Western populations, economies and societies adjust to a global society of predominantly young people wanting to do things in different ways? How do we manage their fears and most effectively defeat the associated politics of reaction?

Do we wish to live in mainly competitive or mainly collaborative societies? How do we create communities instead of isolated competing individuals?

How do we secure liberty and an arena for imaginative and enjoyable actions within a world over dominated by the profit motive?

How do we secure diversity of life upon our planet and provide sufficient space for wildness and for other species to prosper?

How do we grow enough food whilst preserving our soils, our water and our atmosphere?

How can we successfully move away from agricultural practices that burn more calories via fossil fuels, pesticides and fertilizers than they generate in food?

How can we enable people of all genders, races, backgrounds and lifestyle choices to have full opportunities to express themselves and achieve?

As you will see this is not a particularly unique or imaginative or even comprehensive list. I offer it as an illustration of the scale of the challenge we are facing and of some of the kinds of things that I think politicians from all political parties should be worrying about. I believe we are in a very dangerous period of reaction to a necessary transition to a new way of doing things and that the best way of fighting off that reaction is to be clear about where we are going and what we wish to achieve.Whatever you think of the list I believe it to be beyond dispute that the only politician who is worth anything is one who can think their way through the fog of war and gain some kind of level of understanding of the scale of change that is underway and the nature of the transition we need. That quality is in desperately short supply in Britain just at the moment.The Conservative’s best shot at understanding the future comes in the form of their Industrial Strategy. Rarely has a more jumbled and confused rag bag of patched together flawed policies tried to lay claim to being strategic. Labour’s best efforts at constructing an economic strategy read like a tired rehash of the 1970s alternative economic strategy. They show little or no understanding of the full implications of globalisation, the gradual end of the era of the factory, or the scale of the environmental challenge. Instead they demonstrate a naïve conviction that it is possible for one country to go it alone and create a form of socialism in the face of fierce international competition.We seem to have politicians obsessed by tiny issues like the next sound bite or how the Brexit negotiations are going this week. The prime focus is simply how to survive the latest political turmoil. What we desperately need are some strategic thinkers who can raise their heads upwards and see the scale of what is coming and position our country to be ready for it.That is why I stick with the Green Party despite its occasional silliness and its fringe status. It is at least trying to think about some of the big issues properly – even if it muddles the answers quite frequently.Better to mess up occasionally whilst trying to think about the important issues than to ignore a steadily accumulating crisis and hope that it will go away. Change never does.

We are entering a new intellectual, scientific, economic, social and environmental era. It is highly unlikely that anyone is going to understand all of the political implications of that by repeating old formulaic thinking and backing one of the traditional political parties to the hilt.That is what worries me most over the hero worship in some quarters of Jeremy Corbyn and his heavily re-worked Labour Party. I fully buy the idea that there is much to admire in what he is doing and he is getting a lot of things right. I just don’t buy the idea that he has the kind of thinking we need to adjust successfully to the future. I think that many on the left are backing him far too uncritically and failing to recognise the major weaknesses in his thinking. This is going to leave us in a very week position if he either fails to get elected or fails to deliver if he does.Let’s start with the positives. Privatisation of public services has clearly gone way too far and the damage is widespread. We are paying far too much. For example, £180 billion – yes billion is being shelled out on PFI contracts that are way over price and there is no way out of that without paying even more in penalties. We are not getting what we’ve paid for. The government paid Carillion on time to employ contractors to deliver government services. Carillion didn’t pay those contractors for months, demanded discounts and then went bankrupt leaving utter chaos. The Directors got bonuses for doing that. Everyone else got screwed: employees, service users, taxpayers, small businesses, the NHS, future pensioners, and the government. A pattern has emerged whereby when profits are made the contractor gets to keep them. When losses are made they come back to the state. Corbyn is right to want to bring back in house all those services which are about public welfare and he is right that there are massive savings to be made when he does. The top paid Chief of an NHS gets paid under £500,000 a year for managing a complex service under huge pressure. Carillion were still paying their Chief Executive £800,000 a year after he was sacked for incompetence. That’s hardly private enterprise efficiently cutting costs to the bone is it?Corbyn is also right that austerity has been inflicted on the wrong people and that we’ve lost a lot by “freeing up” irresponsible capitalists. The 2008 crash was caused by de-regulation of the financial sector that resulted in it placing bets that were 3 times the value of the entire world economy on obscure financial products. But they got bailed out from the worst of their pain by £400 billion of QE money and $3,000 billion from the States. As a result stock markets are booming and profits are hitting historical highs. Workers are still not back to the same level of wages they enjoyed in 2008. Benefits have been slashed. Local government services like care have been shattered. Yet nothing meaningful has been done to prevent a fresh crash. And the damage of de-regulation didn’t stop there. The fire at Grenfell Tower was caused by allowing building companies to employ their own regulators and suppliers to employ their own testers of the safety of fire panels. Local fire officers were powerless to implement actions to prevent a disaster they predicted because of an ideology that treated them as pesky worriers about health and safety that were getting in the way of efficient business practices.So I have no problem in admiring Corbyn’s stance on these issues. He is right and deserves our full support as he argues for proper investment in the NHS and proper regulatory frameworks.But that doesn’t blind me to his obvious failures. For many people the biggest of these is on Brexit. Labour under Corbyn simply failed to fight for Remain with any conviction. If they had made a determined effort to do that we’d have been spared all the chaos, uncertainty and nationalist nonsense of the past 18 months. After the vote he simply gave in on the most important points. The Labour Party started telling voters that it would deliver them a jobs first Brexit. There wasn’t even support from Labour for staying in the Single Market and a clear opportunity to win a vote for that in Parliament with the support of the Remain Conservatives was frittered away. Instead we have Corbyn saying he can help us to leave the Single Market and get something almost as good if not better. If Boris Johnson said that he’d be ridiculed. Where is the evidence that Corbyn has set up a good alternative deal with Brussels? Where is the evidence that anyone in the EU will accept the UK having full access to the markets but not obeying the rules? What makes him think he can replace our largest market? Is he sharing the far right’s fantasy of trading again around the world? Does he not know what was in the TTIP deal the US wanted even before Trump took over? How is he going to protect UK workers from vicious new competition once we are outside the EU? Where is the evidence that socialism in one country is possible in a global world? Does he not understand the value to ordinary workers of being shielded inside a trading zone that tries to maintain workers rights and high standards?The failure of leadership has been enormous and unforgivable. Last week he hinted that if public opinion changed that he might be prepared to think about a second referendum at some future date. That is weak following not leadership. A leader tells the public that we must have a genuine vote on the reality of the final deal and doesn’t keep repeating that we have no choice other than to follow the outcome of a referendum based on politicians’ promises that have already proved to be false.It would be nice to think that this is just a curious lapse from Corbyn but the truth is that it isn’t. He has been ambivalent about the EU from the start because he recognises it as a project of the liberal political centre and he thinks that he needs to be free of it if he is going to establish a socialist Britain. Leave aside for a moment whether he is right or wrong on this and whether it is a desirable thing to achieve. Ask instead a different question. Is this the kind of thinking that reflects an understanding of where the world is heading in the next 20 years? Does Corbyn’s political philosophy offer evidence of understanding the amount of new and radical thinking that is going to be needed to deal with an economy built around robotics, bioengineering, small decentralised energy generation, online employment, de-plasticisation of society, and a circular economy? Does he understand that the central battle of the next 20 to 30 years is about human and planetary survival in the face of a global environmental crisis and the need to find ways of globally managing a global economy, a global society and a global ecology?My answer is a resounding no. To me Corbyn comes across as still putting forward the Alternative Economic Strategy of 1970 without adding much if any new thinking. A bit of lip service to ecology. A bit of lip service to women. But let’s get on with the serious working class stuff first.I think we need better than that and we need it fast. I am worried stiff that he is going to saddle us with a bad Brexit because of weak and inconsistent opposition to it. I am worried that he is going to lose the next election because he isn’t articulating a sufficiently forward looking vision. I am worried that if he does get in he is going to mess up because he’ll be handling post Brexit chaos without the intellectual analysis that is needed to have any serious chance of steering our way through it.We need better than this. Some of the new thinking we need is in evidence within the Labour Party. Whenever it comes to the fore it is important to support it and to strike alliances on the ground to work together on common issues. The same is true of the Liberal Democrats. And some of the determined and honest Remain Conservatives. It is true of a lot more people in the Green Party, in the SDP and in Plaid. I continue to believe that the current ecological, social, economic and technological crisis is so dramatic that we can’t afford to think and act from within political tribes and that we need to strike alliances with anyone who is prepared to think with an open mind about what it will be necessary to do to adapt. We are in a battle with reaction to change that is particularly vicious and ugly. We are not going to win that battle by insisting that everyone shuts up and gets behind Corbyn uncritically.

It is beginning to become obvious that outsourcing the work of government departments isn’t easy. Mistakes can be made at every step in the way. And making those is what this government seems to determined to turn into its own special talent.Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, before you can contract something out effectively you have to know what you want. That is a rare phenomena right now amongst government Minsters. They don’t even know what kind of Brexit they want but even when it comes to simpler questions like energy policy they are in a complete muddle. Their expert opinion was that they wanted private contractors to bid to build a large nuclear reactor that would produce energy at twice the price available on the commercial market. As a consequence of their muddled thinking the UK is now using Chinese money to pay a French company to undertake a gigantic construction project that needs to be delivered on time and on budget if the lights are going to stay on reliably. What could possibly go wrong?Once you’ve decided what you need it is then usually wise to figure out how much it is reasonable to pay. But that has also stumped this government. It wants the railways to be operated by private companies but hasn’t realised that it is actually quite hard to predict the fair price to pay for driving railway coaches down tracks for the best part of a decade. So much changes and so much depends on the number of customers. There are also only a very small number of companies who are capable of bidding to do the job. So the government found itself faced with a very small number of bids and was then legally required to accept the lowest bidder who met the criteria in the contract.For some of the operators that turned out to produce a very nice bonanza indeed. Profits have been rolling in because the price was too high. But if you issue a contract and the company that holds the successful franchise makes billions you can’t legally ask for the public’s money back. The winner of the bidding process will point to their contract and to an open bidding process and insist that you carry on paying. Billions of rail users’ money leaches away in excess payments to the contractor and the government is utterly powerless to stop the waste. Or to be more accurate is directly to blame for it and for the high prices rail users pay for very poor services.When the price was miscalculated in the other direction the situation was very different. The contractor’s shareholders won’t just sit there and put up with regular losses for the best part of a decade. All they have to do is to declare the company that was set up to bid for the contract bankrupt and there is not a damn thing any government can do about it. So the franchise holder on the East Coast line turned round to the government and handed back their contract to save themselves two billion. At the same time as the contract holder on the West Coast line was happily pocketing a very large amount of money. Heads government loses. Tails government loses. Or rather heads customers lose. Tails customers lose.If all that wasn’t bad enough we come finally to the horrible farce of Carillion. We have been asked for decades to believe that public servants aren’t very good at running things like schools, hospitals, care service, prisons and the like and we need to contract out large chunks of those services to better more efficient management teams. We were constantly told that what we needed was new and better private sector management. It now turns out that what the new private sector managers were good at was paying themselves very large salaries and bonuses. They were also quite talented at raiding their employees pension funds at exactly the same moment in time that they were informing their shareholders the company was in rude health and they could collect yet another excellent dividend. Then suddenly reality hit. They discovered that running public services on the cheap is actually very hard to do and went bankrupt.

So a government that offered us stability has thousands of people working on its behalf who don’t know whether their pay cheque will arrive at the end of this month. Or how much of their pension fund has been run down to pay for directors’ bonuses. A government that prides itself on its reputation for economic competence doesn’t know who will be running large parts of its prison service next week and has no idea how it is going to get a whole series of major construction projects finished. And a government that prides itself on championing private enterprise culture is watching hard working self-employed construction workers going to the wall because they haven’t been paid. This is not cock up. This is system error. Each part of the process of contracting out is going wrong because ideological obsession has replaced good judgement. The government for decades has been operating on the assumption that the best way to improve efficiency in the public sector is to contract out more and more of it. Thatcher started the process. Labour did it under Blair and created the horrific Private Finance Initiative and the start of the academies programme. Now the May government has reaped the rewards of employing one giant contractor to deliver its services by farming them out to a forest of sub-contractors that it wasn’t paying properly.There is nothing wrong with the private sector delivering some services for the government. It has been happening since at last the start of the nineteenth century when contractors like Telford built a network of roads and bridges on their behalf. What is wrong is an obsessive conviction that the private sector must always be more efficient and the neglect and destruction of morale within the public sector which must inevitably result.It is time for a radical re-think about public service. Time to restore pride in the concept that it is a good and a worthwhile thing to spend a career running services well on behalf of the public and that it is not admirable enterprise when you rip off taxpayers, customers, sub-contractors and employees and walk away with large bonuses. Time to focus on understanding what needs to be done to deliver public services well over a long period of time and to implement simple good management practices and good professional practice at every level instead of looking for an instant quick fix by farming the service out.Don’t hold your breath on the ability of this government to make the necessary intellectual changes. It is quite simply ideologically incapable of understanding what is going wrong and why or of formulating a sustainable plan of action to get us out of the mess. I leave you to dwell on the implications for the future of this country of being under such leadership. I recommend a strong drink.

The Conservative Party have made an important change of line over Green issues. They have decided that if they talk enough about them then it might just help to detoxify their brand.On one level the change of tone is genuinely very welcome. I would rather have a government that says environmental issues are important than the situation we had for much of Cameron’s government of an active climate change denier being in charge of policy making. I also happen to genuinely believe that there are a lot of very good environmentally minded conservatives out there and there is nothing whatsoever to stop a business-friendly government from going Green. Getting the Conservative Party to believe in conserving things shouldn’t be as hard as it has often been in the past.On the rather more important downside, the thing about environmental policies is that it is usually more important to do something than to talk about maybe doing something at some time in the future if you still feel like it and it is not too much trouble for anyone.Many people have pointed out this week that if you really wanted to do something for the environment then you might start by abandoning fracking, pulling out of the ludicrously expensive and clumsy Hinkley Point project, taxing fossil fuels more heavily in order to subsidise public transport and passing a law requiring plastic bottles to be returnable. Don’t hold your breath. Remember this is about brand detoxification not about the environment.Even on areas of policy where much could be achieved quickly at very low cost little of substance is being done. Take housing policy for instance. The Conservatives have gone all out to encourage the building of hundreds of thousands of new homes – many of them large executive estates on green fields across the country that do little to meet need and a lot to pay back major donors from the construction industry. What they have not done is thought through how much of an opportunity large numbers of new homes provide when it comes to environmental policy.Every house built is a chance to rethink the way our homes impact on the environment. It would be incredibly easy and very cheap for government to pass legislation to take full advantage of that opportunity. For example, what is the point in building a new home without an electric car charging point included in it. As the only Green District Councillor in Craven I tried to insert this requirement into our local plan but the most I could get out of our Conservative council was a commitment to include something along these lines in detailed guidance. Make the inclusion of a charging point a national requirement for all new buildings approved and you achieve a step change in the number of homes owners who can switch away from fossil fuel without significant difficulty. It puts people off from buying an electric car if they have to knock a hole in their outside wall, hire a contractor and pay quite a bit of money to plug their new electric car into their home. It encourages them to buy one if the equipment is there as standard in their new home. The cost of doing this whilst building is a few pounds.But why stop there? Modern technology is making it easy and cheap to generate electricity in your own home. Indeed many existing home owners are paying a lot of money to put solar panels on their roof or install heat exchange systems. It is a lot easier to do this whilst you are constructing a new home. Any Conservative Government that was genuinely committed to the environment would pass legislation requiring each new housing estate to generate more power than it will use. You don’t have to tell anyone how to do this – and with the pace and flexibility of change it would be wrong for government to do so. You could incredibly easily require that it is done. Much the same kind of step change could be achieved around food waste processing facilities on large new housing estates. These are not radical far left policies. They are simple easy measures that ought to be possible for any government with imagination and a real interest in change to adopt.There have been, of course, some improvements to the environmental standards that builders have to achieve but they fall well short of the visionary step change that could be achieved by making a clear commitment that everything new that we build has to be planned around reducing and turning back environmental impact.But there is no point in passing good laws if you don’t check whether the regulations are implemented. Instead of ensuring that high standards are set and monitored the modern Conservative Party has spent four decades trying to reduce regulation and avoid close monitoring. To the point where the Grenfell Tower contractors were able to hire their own fire safety monitors and the constructors of the panels were allowed to do the same with their inspectors. The local fire service identified that the building was a high risk but could not issue any instructions to do anything about this because of an ideological belief that all this health and safety checking was a burden on enterprise.Achieving anything significant on the environment requires government to be prepared to act. It requires law, regulation, inspection, penalties for non-compliance and a determination to see desired actions implemented. Where are the realistic signs that May’s government is seriously contemplating that?So the real test of Theresa May’s commitment to environmental policies is a simple one. Has she actually required anyone to do anything significant? The answer so far is a resounding no.What May said this week amounts to little more than “Wouldn’t it be nice if someone did something”.I don’t know about you but I don’t find that an impressive position for a Prime Minister to adopt. I thought she was supposed to be in charge of making policy and leading the country forward.

I spent two days this week as an in patient at Bradford Royal Infirmary, getting a close observation of the crisis in the NHS. I can safely say that I have never seen more people working more intensively and the pressure really was showing.The positives of the NHS are enormous. I was in to have my prostate removed by a robotic assisted operation which was done in a state of the art facility. The thing about prostate cancer is that it is a very nasty killer if it is left unidentified until too late in the process and a perfectly reasonable problem to deal with if it is spotted early. I got spotted early and was on a screening programme that meant that when my scores went over a certain level action was taken in good time.In a collective health care system there is nothing to discourage individuals from getting themselves screened. In an individualised insurance based system you risk putting your premiums up every time you refer yourself for a potential problem like cancer. Putting that more bluntly more people die of cancer if they refer themselves too late because they are scared of the cost. The NHS saves lives.Because of this some excellent people are prepared to devote much of their lives to working for it. There is an ideal there that still inspires and it was lovely to watch new enthusiastic trainees being taught very skilfully, and with great patience, how to look after the patients on my ward.What was less lovely was to watch exhausted experienced professionals literally running between patients and the complete lack of any margin for error or slack periods when the pressure eased off. Maybe I hit a bad night but patients will still being received into the post operative ward well after 10 pm and there were a series of crises including a patient death in the bed opposite me at 5 in the morning. Even very experienced staff need a degree of time for themselves when they have been delivering CPR and failing and then are contacting relatives and dealing with their grief. All the staff got was the need to move on rapidly to looking after the next person.It took 4 hours to discharge me. A fifteen minute job. The delay was not because of any inefficiency of the staff. The simple reason was that it was impossible for them to cobble together more than 5 minutes at a time to devote to a routine and delayable job. Throughout the day there was real pressure on the time of each individual and they were battling with frustrations over the workings of simple pieces of kit like patient record computers.If you listen to the weasel words of the enthusiasts for privatisation then the best way of dealing with all these pressures is to bring in more business expertise and to work more effectively. I have always been an enthusiast for business efficiency and I hate waste and disorganisation. I also believe that there are many circumstances in which the private sector is a lot better than the public sector – in the telecommunications industry for instance. But privatisation doesn’t work for the NHS for a number of important reasons.Firstly, the service depends on the dedication of the staff to an ideal. Commercialise that and you risk the entire ethos of the service. There is simply no way that government can afford to attract people to work in health and care via financial incentives. People working in the NHS obviously want and need reasonable pay levels but a great many of them are basically there because they believe in the work. Destroy that and the cost will be enormous both financially and socially.Secondly there is the difficulty in identifying which parts of the service to offer to private companies and of getting the contracting right. There are individual sections of any NHS hospital that you could package up and contract out relatively easily. Blood tests would be a good example. It isn’t that hard to draw a circle around that part of the service identify exactly what you want and offer it out in a contract.But all you achieve by doing this is to hive off the easy and predictable parts of the NHS which the public sector is usually already running well. Instead of cutting costs you increase them by outsourcing the profitable jobs. You also increase the time spent on defining what service level you want, inviting bids, awarding contracts and checking those contracts are being delivered. You can’t solve a financial crisis by giving the profit making bits of your operation to private companies and focusing on doing all the hard, expensive and unpredictable things.Health care isn’t like selling supermarket produce. There are peaks in need whenever there is bad weather or an outbreak of a particular condition. You need a degree of flexibility that can’t always be defined in a contract. Either a contract of employment or a contract with a private company. During an epidemic you can’t have too many employees saying they have done their bit and are going home or a contractor tell you that you didn’t pay for this kind of demand level so they aren’t required to deliver it.Yet, each month a little bit more of the service is hived off. Each year there is less money available for each operation as tiny increases in funding fail to keep pace with the age of the population. Each day a new set of experienced staff decide that they can no longer put themselves through the personal pressures of work at the sharp end of an A&E unit or an emergency ward. Many of them come back on higher pay under a contract that means they carry lower responsibilities. Every year there is a new attempt at re-organisation which simply adds to the pressures.There never will be a day when any government in the UK is brave enough to announce the death of the NHS. The Conservatives will always proclaim that they are the champions of it. They keep claiming they have allocated record sums of funding and real terms increases. In fact they have shattered the funding for the local authority care service and left the NHS to deal with the crisis. My mother spent 6 weeks in an NHS hospital bed for the simple reason there was no care bed available The NHS picked up the bill. They are being asked to make up the slack in the care system whilst also being provided with less money per operation. We are witnessing a slow and gradual destruction of the service. This is an ideologically driven choice and all the harder to resist for being done slowly and steadily.The NHS desperately needs both extra funding and an opportunity to step back from continual re-organisation and just focus on running the service well. What we are seeing instead is an incredibly valuable service being steadily weakened.We need to challenge the myth that the service is failing because it is a form of socialism. The truth is that this kind of service can only succeed if it is inspired by an ideal that we are all at risk of illness and we all need to club together to see each other through hard times.I do not believe that the staff I saw working so hard this week would get much immediate relief from their pressures by an increase in funding and an end to top down re-organisations. But I do believe it would be a huge boost to their morale to get a message from someone in government that there is a determination to work with them and let them get on with their jobs with a little more support and a lot less interference.The best first step towards doing this would be to raise income tax and use it to support the NHS. The staff are being pushed to the limits and it is time for the public to push back and tell its politicians that they value the NHS enough to pay up.

​The problem with firmly held beliefs is that when the evidence proves those beliefs to be completely and totally wrong then many people choose to cling on to them all the more strongly rather than realise they’ve made a mistake. This phenomena was first researched decades ago when a religious sect was told that the world was going to end on a specific date and instead of quitting the group when it didn’t most members decided that their prayers had saved humanity.Quite a few people seem to be thinking that their prayers are saving humanity at the moment. In the UK, as the evidence stacks up that we were lied to about Brexit, a surprisingly high proportion of people are sticking to their guns and believing all the more fanatically that it is all going to somehow be magnificent.To those of blind faith the pain of leaving is being interpreted as evidence of how badly those nasty Europeans really are and as extra evidence that we need to get out. A drop in the pound, a decline of our nation from 5th to 7th richest nation in the world and a nationally humiliating lack of countries seeking to do new trade deals with us is apparently not a cause for worry if you can convince yourself that with one bound we are about to make our nation great again. We’ve moved from being one of the fastest growing countries in the EU to one of the slowest but faith over rides evidence.A similar refusal to accept the evidence in front of us exists amongst many on the left. They hear Corbyn promising us a jobs first Brexit. They hear him refuse to guarantee that Labour will keep us in the single market. They hear him firmly rule out a second referendum. Yet 80% of Labour voters who back Remain think Corbyn also does so. At the same time as 80% of Labour voters who back Leave believe – with considerably more evidence – that he supports that. Both sides can’t be right so a lot of Labour voters are deluding themselves. I suspect that the refusal to honestly insist that the final deal must go before the British public will come back to haunt Labour.It is, however, in the US that the failure to face up to reality is hitting new heights. It is not necessary to read a book written by someone who observed his administration close up to know how childish Donald Trump is. You only have to read his twitter feed. It doesn’t take a degree in psychology to worry about a man who can send out a tweet saying “My button is bigger than your button” when dealing with an international crisis. Anyone who has ever been in a playground ought to be able to see through that. Similarly, if you are an American citizen battling with one of the plethora of climate related disasters that have struck the country this year then it ought to be pretty obvious that you need to worry about a President who looks at TV pictures of extreme cold and concludes that climate change doesn’t exist and we can let the oil companies drill wherever they want. The evidence is mounting up that the only measures Trump is serious about implementing are tax cuts and free gifts to dubious business enterprises. Then there is the staggering lack of real deep self-belief that propels him to inform us that he is a stable genius. Not exactly the kind of thing that would come from Einstein is it?Instead of believing the evidence of their own twitter feeds quite large numbers of US citizens still refuse to accept that they’ve voted in a deeply immature man who has no intention of helping anyone other than himself and his business associates. They’d rather believe that the entire media are left wing fanatics printing fake news than that the person they voted is the fake.It would be possible to get deeply depressed by this ability of some people to hold fast to beliefs that are obviously false. All the more so as I expect it to get a lot worse before it gets better, because irresponsibly giving away free money to the richest in society is highly likely to create a short-term boom which will see claims about Trump’s genius being peddled on both sides of the channel.Fortunately, there is another important factor in play. The small religious group that predicted the end of the world may have redoubled their faith when they concluded that their prayers avoided it. The vast majority of those who didn’t share their blind faith simply concluded that they were wrong. And had a good laugh at the expense of their extraordinary stupidity.You can fool some of the people some of the time. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Sooner or later reality has a helpful way of winning all its battles with blind faith. The majority of people in the US voted against Trump – by a margin of 3 million. Since then he has been losing support in shedloads with each new stupidity. It would be nice to think that each day he spends in office helps to completely finish off the far right in the States as a realistic political force for generations.Or is that me choosing to believe in my own naïve faith instead of facing up to the full awfulness of reality?

Given how much debate there has been about whether we should Brexit, it continues to astonish me how little high quality debate there has been about what the impact will be in any particular area of our society. Instead of providing MPs with proper impact assessments that could be carefully questioned and analysed, the government has allowed most of its Ministers to bumble along making banal statements and scarcely thinking things through.With the surprising exception of Michael Gove. Not someone I have a lot of respect for, because of the clumsy nostalgic curriculum he forced on the country’s children when he was in charge of education. But, give him his due, he is currently asking some of the right questions about farming policy post Brexit. So I have no hesitation whatsoever in saying that I agree with him that it would be good to replace the Common Agricultural Policy with subsidies targeted at encouraging farmers to produce more environmentally sensitive ways.I also have no hesitation in saying that even if he stays as Environment Minister for 5 years and actually implements this excellent policy it won’t be enough to undo the damage to farming and to the environment caused by leaving the EU.There are a number of big drivers which influence the economics of agriculture. The level of subsidies is significant but relatively small. The largest and far more influential factor is the price that food can be sold for. A close second in the cost of production.If Britain leaves the EU and strikes new trade deals it is very hard to believe that any country will sign such a deal if it leaves out agriculture. So, despite the contradictory statements from UK Ministers, there is no doubt at all that leaving the EU means importing cheap food from abroad. Which might be fine if that food was produced by the same methods that UK farmers use. Much of it isn’t.The most likely beneficiaries of increased sales to the UK are US farmers along with New Zealand and Australian ones. So start by assuming that UK sheep farmers are going to see tumbling prices for what they produce and many hill farmers are going to go out of business. As it happens if there was a gradual move away from sheep farming to other uses of upland farms then it would be a very good thing for the environment as sheep tend to close crop the land and leave it a low diversity treeless grassland. Widespread farming bankruptcies would not. The impact on upland rural communities would be quick and brutal.When it comes to cattle the damage is likely to be much worse. In the US it is commonplace to put thousands of cattle into one shed and to keep them permanently indoors in a system of meat and milk production which is very similar to battery farming of chickens. The animals can’t turn around easily. They have all the food and water that they might need easily on hand and just stand there all day eating and moving little. The result is that they put on a lot of meat or produce a lot of milk very quickly. Huge quantities of sewage are produced which go far beyond what can be utilised on nearby farms so it has to be shipped out or processed or just allowed to leak into the rivers and then the oceans killing off wildlife by promoting blooms of algae. If one animal gets sick then it quickly spreads to all the others so the cattle have to be soaked in antibiotics to prevent illness.The day the UK signs its magically wonderful new trade deal with the US a system of arbitration will come into existence which will be able to over-ride the decisions of parliaments in both countries. US corporate lawyers will therefore be able to insist that the UK government cannot pass laws that shuts out food produced by such ugly mass-produced methods. US beef and milk will therefore come into the UK at prices that few UK farmers will be able to compete with. The same will happen with pork. With chlorinated chicken. And with pesticide soaked grain harvests. UK farmers may therefore find themselves in the interesting situation of being able to apply to Michael Gove’s department for a subsidy if they farm environmentally and being certain to go out of business if they do. The only way to deal with cheap competition is either to adopt the same methods and produce every bit as cheaply yourself or to find a niche market as a quality producer. There aren’t enough niche consumers to avoid carnage across UK agriculture.At the same time as dealing with these pressures of falling prices farmers are going to be dealing with increased labour costs and serious labour shortages because of fresh immigration controls. This is not a description of a golden age of environmentally sound farming. It is a recipe for disaster.All of which leaves me to wonder what motives Michael Gove could possibly have for re-launching himself as the green environment minister. Why would a politician promise farmers that they could keep their current subsidies for 5 years and then promise environmentalists that lovely green policies will be in place after that?Could it be that there’s an election to be fought? Could it be that there is a career to relaunch? Could it be that Mr Gove thinks there are votes in what he is promising? Is it just possible that Gove thinks he can attract extra support for his nationalist Brexit dreams by claiming he can deliver a green paradise post Brexit? Is it just possible that his other Brexit promises are turning out to be such obvious lies that he needs some new ammunition? Is he worried about the farm vote? Is he worried about the green youth vote? Does he see himself reconstructing enough popularity to be well placed to take over from May if the Conservatives win a post Brexit election?I hate to be cynical about Michael Gove’s motives in speaking out so well in favour of some sensible green policies. But the man does have form. And there is a much easier way of helping British farmers adapt to the needs of a new era. We could stay in the EU and reform the CAP. The measures he is proposing would meet with very widespread support from small French farmers and across Germany and Eastern Europe. So UK farmers could keep their high standards, their markets and their workforce – provided they don’t get seduced by the prospect of an easy cure all Brexit.